Contribution short abstract:

Using the conflict over a Bismarck monument as an example, I will demonstrate how the far right in the multi-ethnic border region Lusatia uses the heritage of Imperiality to reinvigorate the politics of Germanizing the region, and thus suppressing the region’s legacies of ethnic plurality.

Contribution long abstract:

The Lusatia region in Eastern Saxony accommodates two nationalities: German and Sorbian. Sorbs, who have settled in the region since the 5th century (and thus claim indigeneity today), have been officially recognized as a national minority since 1948 by the (formerly Eastern) German state, and have their own language, schools, cultural institutions, and their own parliament. The city of Bautzen/Budyšin in Upper Lusatia has also become, within then past ten years, a stronghold of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). In 2021, the local parliament decided on a motion by the AfD to rebuild a Bismarck monument in the city, which led to massive protests by the Sorbian community who had suffered immensely under Bismarck’s anti-minority policies in the 19th century and the attempts to Germanize the minorities situated near the borders of the Prussian empire. Using this ethnographic case study, I show how the region of Lusatia and its heritage becomes a site of political experimentation by far-right agents. Using the figure of Bismarck, they attempt to re-emphasize the region’s Germanness and eradicate the plurality of histories that have shaped Lusatia as a multi-ethnic region. The struggle over the Bismarck monument, as the case study exemplifies, becomes a struggle over the hegemony of political identities. It is not just the heritage of Bismarck that the local far right wants to reinvigorate, but also the Imperial politics of Germanizing and homogenizing the German nation.